Markdown Guitar Tablature

Here is an unexpected use for Markdown that I found by accident. Markdown is good for ASCII guitar tabs. ASCII tab is a text file format used for writing guitar tablature (a form of musical notation) that uses plain ASCII numbers, letters and symbols.

Recently, I copied a sample arpeggio picking pattern and the only editor I had open at the time was a Markdown editor, so I copied it there. It worked perfectly. The tablature that I had copied is below:

e|--------2-----------------|
B|------3---3---------------|
G|----2-------2-------------|
D|--0-----------------------|
A|--------------------------|
E|--------------------------|

Indent each line as you would a code block. This will make the text a fixed width and the tab will be easier to read.

Basic Markdown may not be sufficient for complex pieces, but a music student may well find a way to effectively use Markdown for this.